Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Widowed from our food chain

Swine Flu. Smithfield Farms. CAFOs. H1N1. Senator Collins.

This is the vocabulary of this week's latest international calamity, which you can hardly have escaped hearing about if you've been awake any time in the past three days. Yet another macabre mashup between corporate environmental vandalism and our food supply, with the cost measured in bodies.

Today it's pork. Last time it was peanut butter. Before that, tomatoes, except not really because that one turned out to be tainted jalapenos and too bad for the poor tomato farmers who suddenly couldn't sell their highly perishable crops. Before that it was the fresh-bagged spinach.

Remember that? I wonder what it will be tomorrow.

Last night I was reading Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, when I came across this terribly, terribly apt passage. In it, recently-widowed farm wife Lusa is palling around on her farm with her 10-year-old niece Crystal, looking at obsolete old farm equipment stashed away in the barn:
"Everybody around here used to grow their own wheat and corn for bread, plus what they needed for their animals. Now they buy feed at Southern States and go to Kroger's for a loaf of god-awful bread that was baked in another state."

"Why?"

"Because they can't afford to grow grain anymore. It's cheaper to buy bad stuff from a big farm than to grow good stuff on a little farm."

"Why?"

"Boy, that's hard to answer. Because people want too much stuff, I guess, and won't pay for quality. And also, farmers have to follow rules that automatically favor whoever already has the most. You know how when you play marbles, as soon as somebody starts getting most of the marbles then they're going to win everything?"

"No."

"No?"

"I don't play with marbles."

"What do you play with?"

"Game Boy." Cris had drifted away and was putting her hands on things, drawing circles in the dust, looking under tables. "What's'is?"

"A bee smoker."

The child laughed. "For smoking bees? Do you get high off 'em?"

Lusa wondered what this child knew about getting high but decided again not to react. "No. Smoke comes out of there, and it drugs the bees, as a matter of fact. It makes them dopey and lazy so they won't sting you when you take the top off their hive and steal their honey."

"Oh. That's where honey comes from? People steal it?"

Lusa was surprised at the extent of the girl's ignorance—her generation's ignorance, probably. "People raise bees, for honey. Everybody around here used to, I'm sure. You see old broken-down bee boxes everywhere."

"Now it just comes in a jar."

"Yep," Lusa agreed. "From Argentina or someplace. That's what I mean about big farms far away taking the place of little farms right here. It's sad. It's not fair, and it stinks. Nobody cares, though. I used to live in a city, and I'll tell you, city people do not think this is their problem. They think food comes from the supermarket, period, and always will."

"My mama works at Kroger's. She hates it."

"I know." Lusa looked around at the dim boneyard of obsolete equipment and felt despair for all the things people used to grow and make for themselves before they were widowed from their own food chain.
(Edited for brevity, with my apologies to Ms. Kingsolver)

She's right.

Between raising our kids and ourselves on a steady diet of television, mobile phones, Internet, and game consoles - plus other electronic gizmos and gadgets - we really have become widowed from our own food chain.

And the results of this self-induced ignorance, masquerading as bliss, are seen in disease outbreaks like the one we're facing now.

When nobody's paying attention to where their food comes from, corporations like Smithfield - whether or not they turn out to have actually been responsible for this swine flu outbreak - can get away with manufacturing billions of pounds of meat per year in the most filthy, shocking, and abominable of conditions.

Prodigal Summer was published in 2000, before the start of what seems like a slow but steady parade of disease outbreaks and deaths linked to our overly-industrialized food system.

I get the feeling that if she wrote that book today, she'd have to change that poetically tragic turn of phrase to "widowed by our food chain."

In this context, the first-family's efforts to put in an organic garden at the White House stand out as singularly prescient and well-timed. The message there could not be clearer or more appropriate: Know what you're eating. Know where it comes from. Local, organic food is the best.

Don't think about the swine flu outbreak as just another news story.

Think about it as another ring of the alarm bells that have been going off for some time now: our food system is in crisis.

And as with everything else, it's up to us to fix it. You - yes, you - can and should do three things to help:

First, get some seeds and grow something. May is nearly upon us, but it is by no means too late to start a garden.

My favorite source for seeds is the Territorial Seed Company, which has tons of varieties adapted to the Northwest climate.

And don't tell me you can't because you don't have any room in your yard or because you live in an apartment or condo.

If you have a yard, you can garden. Dig up some of your grass for something more useful. If the best you have is a windowsill, get a planter box and at least grow some herbs. Wherever you live, you can always grow something.

Second, shop regularly at the local farmers' markets. There are literally dozens of farmers' markets scattered around the greater Seattle and Puget Sound region, dozens more in the Portland/Vancouver area, and really, wherever you care to look. It's local food, from local farmers, and most of it is organic.

Third, visit a farm and take your kids. Tell the farmers at the market you're interested in really knowing where your food comes from.

Chances are they'll be pleased you asked. Some of them even give farm tours now and then during the summer. If they don't, encourage them to do so. Take your kids out to the farm. Let them see for themselves where food comes from.

Let ours be the last generation that holds its collective hand up to the side of its face to hide from the ugliness that is industrial farming, be it CAFOs or million-acre monoculture corn fields in the Midwest.

In fact, let's all just stop shielding our eyes right now, and maybe we can make this swine flu outbreak be the beginning of the end of these sorts of tragedies, rather than just another alarm bell on our way to the eventual killer pandemic.

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